A Prison Site’s Future Stirs Up the Ghosts of Its Notorious Past

Maze prison in 1979 in Northern Ireland. A center for the study of peace and conflict resolution is planned for the site.Credit
Associated Press

MAZE, Northern Ireland — On a quiet country road south of Belfast, only the sudden appearance of a watchtower and portions of walls offer any hint of what was once Europe’s most notorious prison. After the last inmates walked out the gates in 2000, the bulldozers moved in, leaving little of the top security fortress intact.

The road signs and the buildings of the old Maze prison have proved far easier to erase than the vivid memories of the events that took place here, particularly the 1981 hunger strike in which Bobby Sands, an Irish Republican Army leader convicted of a firearms charge, and nine of his comrades died in pursuit of the right to be treated as political prisoners rather than criminals.

Now, 15 years after the Good Friday peace accord paved the way for the controversial early release of hundreds of paramilitary prisoners — pro-British unionists as well as republicans opposed to British control over Northern Ireland — the site of the old prison has once again become a vortex of political discord.

After more than a decade of indecision, the power-sharing local government recently agreed to build a center devoted to the study of peace and conflict resolution on part of the old prison site, along with an industrial park for high-tech companies.

The government commissioned Daniel Libeskind, the architect best known for his work at the ground zero site in Manhattan and the Jewish Museum in Berlin, to design the center to reflect the complexities of the conflict, known as the Troubles, that claimed more than 3,000 lives over 30 years.

But instead of being embraced as a powerful symbol of reconciliation and a shared future, the proposed peace center has already become mired in the continuing dispute between unionists and republicans over how the story of the Troubles will be told.

The prototype designs Mr. Libeskind released this month have been eclipsed by the controversy surrounding the site itself, particularly the single remaining H-shaped cellblock containing the small hospital where the hunger strikers spent their last days.

Although the cellblock will not be part of the new center, some pro-British unionists contend that the site will become a “shrine to terrorism.”

“This is the most toxic and divisive site that you could possibly choose for such a building,” said the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, Mike Nesbitt. “It is clear there will be an undue focus on the prisoners rather than their innocent victims.”

Photo

Pat Sheehan was among the Irish Republican Army members who took part in a 1981 hunger strike at Maze prison.Credit
Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times

Other unionists who have supported the project in the local government assembly have dismissed such views as “scaremongering rubbish.”

“The idea that representatives like myself who put on a uniform to fight I.R.A. terrorism and who walked behind the coffins of comrades and family members murdered by the I.R.A. would now countenance a shrine to the I.R.A. is such a nonsense that it says more about the motivation of those who allege it than it does about us,” said Jeffrey Donaldson, an elected representative of a rival unionist party.

One former hunger striker who supports the peace center, Pat Sheehan, 55, contends that its opponents are guilty of overstating the symbolic importance of the site to republicans.

“The people who died are not in the walls or floors of the H-blocks,” he said. “They are alive and well in the hearts and thoughts of another generation who have been inspired by their sacrifice.”

The election of Mr. Sands to the British Parliament weeks before he died bestowed a populist legitimacy on the I.R.A. campaign and eventually propelled Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.’s political wing, to power in the local assembly.

“His victory exposed the lie that the hunger strikers — and by extension the I.R.A. and the whole republican movement — had no popular support,” the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, said of Mr. Sands.

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Mr. Sheehan went 55 days without food and would probably have been next to die had the protest not collapsed under pressure from the prisoners’ families. At the time, his doctors told him he might not survive anyway because of the damage his long fast caused to his liver. But he recovered and is now a Sinn Fein representative in the local Parliament.

In a recent interview, Mr. Sheehan recalled his decision as a 23-year-old to volunteer for the hunger strike.

“The British saw us as the soft underbelly and believed if they could break us it would be a crushing blow to the I.R.A. struggle,” he said. “Bobby Sands believed he was going to die; those of us who went on hunger strike all believed we were going to die, and you had to have total tunnel vision to cope with that decision — you can’t let anything impinge.”

Photo

Gerard Hodgkins also took part in the hunger strike.Credit
Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times

Another former hunger striker, Gerard Hodgkins, 54, spent nearly half his adult life behind bars at Maze and described the fast as the only leverage available to the prisoners. In his small west Belfast apartment, reminders of his prison days are all around, including images of the 10 men, their faces frozen in perpetual youth, on every wall.

“I figured, what more can they do to us?” Mr. Hodgkins recalled. “We had been tortured; we lived in almost total isolation from the outside world in a brutal regime; we wore only blankets and were covered in our own filth in freezing cells. Something had to give, and our choices were very limited.”

Since the Good Friday agreement of 1998, a new industry has sprung up in Belfast as thousands of visitors now embark on guided “terror tours” around the notorious spots where atrocities took place, taking in the peace walls and the vivid murals commemorating the main events.

After Mr. Libeskind’s center opens in 2015, the 15-mile trip to Maze is likely to be included as an evocative finale to the tours.

The body organized to see the project through, the Maze Long Kesh Development Corporation, is eager to play down the history of the prison, pointing out that the site has a long and varied past. It was once a Royal Air Force base and then a racetrack.

The corporation’s chairman, Terence Brannigan, has described the redevelopment plans, and the industrial park’s promise of 5,000 jobs for a moribund economy, as “an opportunity we simply cannot afford to ignore.”

“We have already had significant international interest shown in developing the site, and we anticipate that global investors will be excited about what is an unprecedented development opportunity,” Mr. Brannigan said.

But for most people, the real attraction will not be the industrial park intended to lure high-tech industries, but the chance to glimpse the ghosts of a troubled past.

In a statement last month, Mr. Libeskind said, “It is truly meaningful to build a hope-filled common ground, to tell individual stories and to do so at Maze Long Kesh.”

Critics are dismissing such sentiments as wishful thinking.

“When a group of Irish-Americans turn up with flowers, who will create an international incident by telling them they can’t lay them there?” Mr. Nesbitt said. “People make shrines, and I guarantee you that whatever anyone says, this place will become a shrine.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 19, 2013, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Prison Site’s Future Stirs Up the Ghosts Of Its Notorious Past. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe